


and if the world should end

by englishsummerrain



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Childhood Friends, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Trope Subversion, minor jaemle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:49:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27723725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishsummerrain/pseuds/englishsummerrain
Summary: He doesn't want to take a chance on someone else. He wants what has always been in front of him. The boy who climbed up the drainpipe aged seventeen just so they could kiss under the stars.  Fuck everything else — Chenle wants Jeno.
Relationships: Lee Jeno/Zhong Chen Le
Comments: 28
Kudos: 118
Collections: Challenge #3 — soulmates





	and if the world should end

**Author's Note:**

> for ALW's soulmates round :) loosely based on the 'hang the dj' episode of black mirror

_It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was._

_You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you._

_-_ E. M. Forster

“So what do you do for a living?”

It takes everything in Chenle’s power not to smack his forehead on the table. Instead he lets out an audible sigh, causing the (admittedly very pretty) man opposite him to look rather shocked.

“I’m sorry?” he offers. It’s not his fault. Really, it’s not anyone’s fault. Chenle is just fucking _bored_. Bored of all this. The pretty faces, the formalities, the trying to get to know each other and praying that there’s a spark. Sure — he squints at the nametag on the guy opposite him’s shirt — Na Jaemin is probably a lovely person and they’d probably have great and hot sex and maybe they _were_ soulmates, and maybe they’d get married and have a nice house and adopt a child and do all the things that you were supposed to, like ticking off the predetermined list that everyone was handed when they were eighteen. Maybe that was all supposed to happen. They’re all here for the same reason. Late twenties. Still haven’t felt that magic buzz. Had that magic little mark appear on their skin. None of them have found their soulmates.

“Sorry,” Chenle says, pursing his lips into a line. “Sorry, it’s just.” He sighs. “I hate the small talk. Can we get to the part where we fuck each other’s brains out?”

Jaemin cocks an eyebrow. “And they say romance is dead.”

Chenle kicks him out of his room after he comes, not even bothering with a goodbye or an offer of his shower. It’d be the gentlemanly thing to do, he’s sure, but thought of it makes the bitter taste in the back of throat even more pronounced, and he’s sure if he thinks about it too much he’ll throw up — which is literally the last thing he needs right now. He refills his glass from the tap in the bathroom and swallows it all in one go, trying to wash the taste of Jaemin’s borderline acidic cum from his mouth. His hair is matted to his forehead and he adjusts it, rucking his hands through it, frowning as it keeps flopping down and then giving up — because who the hell is going to see it, anyway? Who’s he dressing up for? None of it even matters.

There’s a knock somewhere outside. On the sliding door beside his bed, he thinks. He grabs the silk dressing gown he’d left hanging on the back of the bathroom door and slips it on, belting it up at the waist and picking up a half empty bottle of wine from the liquor cabinet as he passes back through the room. The bed is still unmade. Sweaty, probably. Drops of bodily fluids and lube, sheets bunched up from where Jaemin had gripped them tight in his fists.

He’d been pretty. Nice. Good body. Good fuck.

Completely fucking pointless. With each day — with each person he’s paired up with — he begins to lose hope. The knot in his stomach twists tighter and doubts begin to creep up on him. Doubts and more — thoughts he’s not allowed to entertain. It’s dangerous to entertain them — if he thinks too long on them he knows they’ll burst free, come spilling out of his traitorous mouth like overflow from the Styx, spelling his death. Spelling trouble.

There’s another knock on the door and Chenle jumps, grateful for the distraction. He sets the glass on the bedside table and rubs at his cheek with a sigh, then walks out, striding over to pull the curtain open.

On the other side is Jeno — crescent moon eyes, waving his hand in a greeting. “Let me in?” he asks. Chenle undoes the lock on the ranch slider and pulls it open, warm night breeze curling around his bare legs, a grin breaking out across his features.

“How about I come out? It’s not nice in there.”

“Oh,” Jeno says. His face falls for a second, voice flattening. “Did you have someone over?”

“Yeah,” Chenle says, and it settles in the pit of his stomach. Bitter regret. Just a body. Not the person he loves. Not the person he’s loved for years. “It — it didn’t mean anything.”

“It’s okay,” Jeno says, shaking his head. “You don’t have to justify yourself. You’re—” he waves his hand. “It’s not like we’re together anymore.”

“No,” Chenle says, and he steps out onto the deck, into the night, under the blanket of stars that wraps him up without a speck of warmth. “But I still love you.”

“Chenle…” Jeno says, and he turns away slightly, like he’s shielding himself. “Please don’t do this.”

The wine is still in his hand. He takes a step and puts it down on the table, glass on glass clattering. The condo is one of the better ones — not out on the dock out over the water, but at the edge of the treeline, looking out over the white sand of the beach, the moon reflected in the black waves, little red dots of the boundary winking like eyes out on the horizon. A cage, trapping him here until his heart caved in.

“Do what? It’s true. You know it’s true.”

“And you know we can’t.”

“I know,” Chenle says with a sigh. His body still aches, post orgasmic clarity serving no purpose but to sharpen the want that seems to possess his every move.

“Then why bring it up?”

He looks back at Jeno — stupid, beautiful Jeno. He’s dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing earlier that night at the restaurant, slim black jeans and a black turtleneck, though he’s taken his contacts out and swapped back to his thick framed glasses. His hair is soft and done up slightly, looking like he’d done the same thing as Chenle — rucked his fingers through it backwards to make it stick up a little. He looks just like he always has. Soft. Warm. Like home. Like the boy who Chenle had accidentally sat beside at lunch in his first year of high school — the captain of the football team who’d smiled at him and told him not to worry, and to sit with him.

The boy he’d shared his first kiss with under the bleachers, under the friday night lights, on his single bed with his comic books on the bedside table, music on the radio, sticky popsicles on their lips. The boy who’d climbed the drain pipe when he was seventeen to knock on Chenle’s second floor window and tell him to come watch the stars with him.

He’d kissed him on that roof a hundred times. Set out a blanket and ate candy while Jeno pointed out all the constellations, and all the time there’d been that nagging sensation — the fact that every day Chenle had scoured every inch of his body hoping for his mark to appear. All through high school, all through college — when Jeno took the acrobatics to get to Chenle to new heights and broke the bracket on his dorm window trying to get up onto his balcony. They’d lie on Chenle’s bed together, Chenle’s sweat slick chest pressed against Jeno’s naked back, legs tangled, tracing patterns on each other’s skin, murmuring hopes of the future to each other.

It would turn up eventually wouldn’t it?

(It never did)

“Because,” Chenle starts — and then he realises he probably can’t do this sober. He picks up the wine and drinks straight from the bottle, swallowing mouthful after mouthful until he thinks he’s had enough that he’ll be able to follow this conversation thread to the end.

“Oh my god,” Jeno says. Chenle winces, offering the bottle to him. It’s good wine — it’s not painful going down, but he had just drunk _a lot_ at once. College him would be proud. Adult him is horrified.

“Do you want it?”

“Are we really doing this?”

“Doing what?”

Jeno’s eyes are steely, moonlit and filled with stars. “Fine,” he says, the words themself enough of a confession. His fingers brush Chenle’s as he takes the bottle from him and it sends a spark through him — the first strike of the match against the box.

He takes a swig of the bottle, swallowing, looking Chenle in the eye then upending it properly, throat bobbing. “Fine,” he repeats. “Fuck. What is it?”

“This is bullshit,” Chenle says. The wine hasn’t hit yet, but he’s emboldened. He wants so badly to take the single step it would take to bring him into Jeno’s personal space, cradle his face in his hands and kiss him. Do what he’s not allowed to. In theory Jeno shouldn’t even be here. They were already proven not to be a match, and therefore weren’t allowed in each other’s residences after dark. In reality, of course, Jeno had plenty of practice jumping fences for Chenle — risking expulsion to sit on his back porch and talk with him was pretty low on the list of rules he’d broken.

“The wine, or...?”

“That’s nice wine. I’m offended on its behalf.”

“Didn’t know you’d taken to championing the feelings of alcohol.”

“Shut up,” Chenle says, though he’s laughing. “You know what I mean. This whole fucking thing. This… bringing a different guy into my bed every fucking night. All these first dates. Trying to make conversation, get to know each other. All these dates and dinners and spending time with strangers, acting like someone I find will magically replace you. It feels like groundhog day. It feels pointless.”

“You know we’re not soulmates, though,” Jeno says, soft. “You know… you know there’s someone out there for you.”

“So?” Chenle says. His hand opens and closes around nothing. “Maybe there is. But — god, Jeno. I have to go into that fucking restaurant every night and sit in front of pretty faces that I don’t fucking care about and try not to throw up my fucking food because _all I can fucking think about_ is the fact that you’re out there with someone else and that someone else isn’t me. That by the end of this we might be with other people. And you know what? Fuck that.”

Jeno flinches, eyes wide, a soft exclamation falling from his lips. “You can’t say that, Chenle.”

“Well, I just said it, didn’t I?”

“You’re,” Jeno starts, and he’s faltering. He takes a deep breath. “You’ll find your someone. We knew it was temporary, didn’t we? You said it yourself.”

“It was temporary because someone told us it was temporary. Because I don’t have a mark on my body, and you don’t have a mark on yours. How stupid is that? What if it’s all wishful thinking? What if we want to believe that soulmates work so badly that when we find ours we just ignore all the bad things because we’re told we’re supposed to love this person. That they’re supposed to be one.”

“Woah,” Jeno says, and then there’s silence. The waves beating down on the shore, the two of them staring at each other. Chenle’s blood is hot under his skin and he can feel his heartbeat, the slam against his ribcage, the irrefutable proof that he is alive.

“Sorry,” Chenle says, glancing away into the darkness of the trees. A strong gust comes barreling through, howling like a trapped beast, causing the branches to crack against each other.

“Don’t be sorry. It’s just… it’s just a lot to think about.”

“Do you ever think about it? About how maybe they’re all wrong?”

Jeno bites his lip, then reaches for the wine. He takes a drink and swallows forcefully, glancing at the door then setting his eyes back on Chenle.

“Sometimes,” he says. “Um. Can we go inside? I don’t like being out here.”

They sit down on the bed together, Jeno pulling his legs up on the mattress, Chenle sitting crossed legged, hands on his knees, trying to ignore the smell of sex in the air.

“Sometimes,” Jeno repeats, unprompted. “Sometimes I… god, Chenle this is scary. I’m scared. What if they hear us? What if they’re listening?”

And Chenle leans forward and takes Jeno’s face in his hands and kisses him, and it’s like colour comes back into the world. It’s like the sunrise after endless winter, like the first breath after a coma. Surfacing into reality. A puzzle piece falling into place.

“There,” Chenle says when they part, leaning their foreheads together and breathing in Jeno’s scent. “Now we’ve broken enough rules it doesn’t matter.”

Jeno doesn’t answer. He just kisses him again, threading his hands into his hair, open mouthed and languid, so slow it would be infuriating if Chenle hadn’t missed it so much. They’d put a stop on everything when Chenle had turned twenty seven — an arbitrary number assigned to mean that if they reached that point without a breakthrough, then they simply weren’t meant to be.

Stupid, because Chenle was even more in love with Jeno on that day than he’d ever been. He’s more in love with him now, too. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and with Jeno’s lips on his he feels it all overflow, all his want bursting forth from his chest like doves at a wedding.

“Does it matter if they’re listening?” Chenle says as they part, cupping Jeno’s jaw in his palm. “Does any of it matter, really? Because I’m starting to think it doesn’t. I don’t want to go through with it. I don’t care if I meet my soulmate. I don’t want him. I never have. I want the boy who climbed up the drainpipe and traced the stars with me all summer long. Fuck everything else — I want you, Jeno.”

“Chenle,” Jeno says, and his voice trembles. He reaches out a hand — gentle, touch reverent — and traces the shape of Chenle’s lips. “We can’t.”

“Who says we can’t?”

Jeno’s throat bobs. “What would we even do?”

“Run,” Chenle says, smoothing his thumb over the mole under Jeno’s right eye. “We run.”

“Where?”

“Who fucking cares? I don’t want to be here anymore. Do you?”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“There has to be something nearby. Do you remember when we flew in? There was a town, wasn’t there? That little cluster of nights. We go there. We go back home.”

Jeno takes a deep breath. His lips quiver, mouth opening and closing wordlessly. “I don’t know if it’s even possible…”

“But we can’t stay here, can we?”

Jeno presses a finger against Chenle’s bottom lip, pressing down until Chenle puckers his lips and presses a kiss to the pad of his thumb.

“No,” Jeno says. “I… I don’t want to, either. God, that’s so scary Chenle.”

“Holy fuck,” Chenle says, and he surges forward, kissing Jeno with everything he has, almost knocking him over with the way their bodies crash into each other, with the fervent desire that erupts from him — from the sheer want. God, it’s been so long since he’s had Jeno like this. Since he’s touched him, since they’ve met in this way. Every other moment has been a war of holding back on desire and pretending they both don’t still want each other. Lying to act like they haven’t been in love for almost half their lives. No fucking deadline would every stop that — no unwritten rule.

“Holy fuck,” he repeats, and Jeno is clawing at him — pressing against him, hot, wet breath on his skin. “I love you,” he says. “I love you, I love you. Jeno.” Jeno’s lips on his neck, hands tugging at his hair. “God. No. We have to go, Jeno.”

“I know,” Jeno says, and it’s through gritted teeth. Another kiss, wet and deep. Another. Another, and another. Jeno presses him onto his back and Chenle allows him — just for a moment or two. The two of them holding each other, entwined like they’d always been.

“We really have to go.”

“Yeah,” Jeno says. “Okay. Oh my god. I don’t want to let you go.”

“It’s okay. Let me pack my things. We’ll go to your place, okay?”

Jeno takes a breath. In the gloom his eyes sparkle and Chenle feels his heart seize, crumpling up into a tiny ball and then expanding like a supernova — until it fills his chest, the room, the entire world, until everything becomes about Jeno.

It’s always been about Jeno.

“Okay,” Jeno says. He presses a kiss to Chenle’s lips again. “Okay.”

“I think it’s electric,” Chenle says, staring at the rather intimidating ten foot tall fence that marks the perimeter of the compound. There’s only starlight to guide their way — no floodlights, guard towers abandoned — and the tree line stops a good five meters before the fence. The only way is to climb it.

“Do you think so?” Jeno says. He glances down the line of the fence, then back at Chenle. “Where are the guards? This whole place was swarming with guards, wasn’t it?”

He’s right. Coming in it had felt like a prison, but walking out there’d been nothing. Jeno had remarked it felt like they were the only people in the world.

"Yeah,” Chenle says, and he takes a step forward. The fence is chain link. Easy to climb. No razor wire on the top, nothing to stop them. "Maybe it's alarmed."

"I don't think it is. Listen."

Everything is silent, only the steady beat of the waves in the distance.

"Is this a test?" Chenle asks.

Jeno's eyes spark like a pyroclasm. "Chenle," he says. He lifts a hand and before Chenle can say anything closes it around the fence. 

Nothing happens.


End file.
